About my blogThis blog relates to my academic study of blogs. It details various aspects of my work. Now that I have submitted my thesis, I will try and report some of my findings. I'm also using it to make any observations I have on blogging, and any relevant stories I come across. It's my getting into the spirit of my medium.

About meMy name is Scott Nowson, and this blog reflects the work of my PhD which I received from the University of Edinburgh in 2006.

You can learn more about me, as well as find all my publications, on my website.

I've been promising some sort of discussion of results for so long, so here you are: women blog more than men.

Now, you can claim you already knew that all you like, the point of much research is to scientifically prove what has already been observed, and I feel I've done that. Here's a sneak preview of a section of my thesis:

Diaries are most predominantly kept by females (Thompson, 1982; Burt, 1994) and it has previously been suggested that the majority of bloggers are teenage girls (Orlowski, 2003). A previous study (Herring et al., 2004) found that while each gender accounts for about half of all weblogs, blogs are in fact dominated by females of teen age and preferred by females in general.

Note the distinction between ALL weblogs, and purely personal blogs. My study is just of the latter, and indeed I am only concerend with post that could be described as personal. I have therefore excluded all "Which X are you" quizzes, all Friday Fives, no song lyrics, nothing except for bloggers personal lives, thoughts, and opinions.

Indeed I have found that two thirds of my subjects are female. Not only that, but examining one whole month of every subjects blog has revealed a number of differences, presented here in easy sound bite form:

Women write more than men (statistically significant)

Women write more personal posts than men (statistically significant)

Women write longer personal posts than men

And you can quote me on that. (if you are interested in more specific details, or references, drop me a mail.)